McCaskill gets wooed by White House on tax reform

WASHINGTON — President Trump is using both carrots and sticks to try to nudge Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., to support his push for tax reform.

The carrots came just this week: an invitation to meet with Trump at the White House on Wednesday to talk about tax reform, and a private dinner on the same subject Monday night with the president’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, and her husband, White House adviser Jared Kusher, at the couple’s posh DC residence.

The stick was out in August, when Trump visited Springfield and told Missourians to vote McCaskill out of office if she didn’t support the GOP tax reform proposal.

“She must do this for you, and if she doesn't do it for you, you have to vote her out of office," Trump told the crowd in Springfield.

Whether either tactic will work to woo the Missouri Democrat remains unclear — as do the details of the plan that Trump is pushing. But McCaskill will be front and center as this high-stakes debate unfolds in the coming weeks.

She sits on the Senate Finance Committee, charged with crafting tax policy. And as a moderate up for re-election in a GOP-leaning state, the Missouri Democrat will be under immense pressure from conservatives and business interests to back any tax plan —along with pressure from liberals to resist all things Trump.

On Tuesday, McCaskill told reporters she saw several key areas of possible compromise on taxes, including Ivanka Trump’s push to expand the child tax credit and GOP promises to simplify the tax code.

“Last night was a terrific evening,” McCaskill said of the dinner at Trump and Kusher’s house, which also included a handful of other Senate Democrats and Republicans and two top White House officials. “We exchanged ideas … I was very interested in getting more details about the child tax credit that Ivanka has so hard worked on.”

McCaskill said she asked how big that child credit would be and how many families would be entitled to it — as well as other questions about what loopholes the GOP plan would nix. McCaskill said one of her main concerns is a Republican proposal to cut the tax rate for so-called “pass through” corporations to 25 percent.

Right now, many privately held and limited liability companies pay taxes on their profits at their personal tax rate, which is nearly 40 percent for the wealthiest Americans. Republicans say their proposal to allow those “pass through” companies to pay a lower corporate rate will help small businesses. But McCaskill said it would mostly benefit the super-rich.

“Eighty percent of the benefit of that will go to people who make $1 million or more,” McCaskill said. “I have no problem wanting to give a tax cut to a small business,” she said, but there has to be “guardrails on that.”

McCaskill said she will use the meeting with Trump on Wednesday, which includes other members of the Finance Committee, to press for more details about the overall Republican proposal. GOP leaders have released a nine-page outline that does not spell out key details.

The Republican blueprint, for example, calls for reducing the number of income tax rates from seven to three: 12 percent, 25 percent, and 35 percent. But the outline does not specify which income brackets would be subject to those new tax rates.

The document also calls for slashing the corporate tax rate, now about 39 percent, to 20 percent, while zapping a bevy of unspecified special-interest deductions and exemptions.

“Here’s the thing I want to tell the president tomorrow,” McCaskill said. “I can’t negotiate with you when I don’t have anything to negotiate with” because Republicans have been so vague about their proposal.

“We have no specifics on any of this,” McCaskill said. “It’s kind of like boxing shadows.”